Organizations considering deploying a private cloud or hybrid cloud solution should take their time and plan their environment carefully, as getting maximum value from any kind of architecture requires getting the details right. A managed service provider with expert support that takes the necessary time to understand businesses’ needs can provide valuable guidance on the optimal infrastructure.

Most Common Use Cases

Use cases in which businesses benefit from the Private Cloud are those which have the flexibility to create new environments for workloads and change the resources that are deployed to environments as needed, resulting in more efficient utilization of guaranteed resources. VMware makes creation and management of virtual machines (VMs) easy. Even in potentially catastrophic situations, such as a hardware failure, VMs can be moved in real-time to keep them functioning, with the necessary reboot happening nearly instantly, and invisible to the user.

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The other option for businesses adopting cloud computing is the public cloud. As with other types of environments, the public cloud is optimal for certain kinds of situations, but in others can have significant drawbacks. A public cloud does not run on specific hardware, and therefore does not guarantee resource availability. Private clouds are also typically preferred for environments running regulated or particularly sensitive workloads.

Spikes In Resource Needs

Some businesses adopt a VMware Private Cloud because they can anticipate sudden increases in resource demand, such as happens when an online store runs a sale or special promotion, or a piece of content served by a media company goes viral. If a certain application used by the company has widely varying usage, at a certain point the improved efficiency possible with an agile ecosystem makes the business case. Anticipating this before your current environment starts costing you money is not necessarily easy, but a service-oriented hosting provider can help you do just that.

VMware Private Cloud enables businesses to automatically pull resources from VMs running less critical workloads, and reallocate those resources to the most important workloads to ensure they continue running.

Need to add more resources quickly? Scale up your cloud on-demand, and scale it back down to match your actual needs at the time.

Handling Sensitive Data

There are several different situations in which organizations typically choose to deploy a private cloud to meet security or regulatory needs. Roughly three-quarters of healthcare organizations use cloud infrastructure as of 2017, for example, and though most end up with a hybrid cloud environment, they choose private cloud over public by almost a three-to-one ratio.

The reason, simply put, is isolation. Cloud architecture isolates workloads from each other in their sandboxed VMs. In a private cloud, the VMs are also isolated from running on the same hardware as anyone else’s VMs. While no specific infrastructure type is required by HIPAA, for example, most healthcare organizations choose to limit their exposure with a solution like Managed VMware Private Cloud.

Efficient Development

As businesses increase the amount of development they do, and as they modernize their development processes, they are increasingly reliant on virtualization. Application development and testing processes take a varying amount of resources. Without virtualization, provisioning the resources necessary to complete tasks at the demand peak of the development cycle in a timely fashion is expensive, and that investment is wasted in the less-demanding duration of the cycle.

A test environment can be scaled up to accelerate processing overnight, with resources that were used by other applications during the business day. Need to catch up? Scale up to complete the job, and then scale back down to conserve costs.

Hybrid: Match Workloads To Environments

The benefits of a premium private cloud for certain kinds of workloads make it particularly suitable as part of a hybrid solution. In many cases, large global enterprises will opt for a hybrid cloud environment. For businesses with dozens or hundreds of employees, private cloud is often deployed in combination with a fixed-resource environment.

It makes sense to keep some workloads that have consistent resource usage on a shared or Dedicated Server, while those workloads that are likely to cycle up and down, like dev-ops, or that need to run silently in the background before springing into action when needed, like backups, are moved to the cloud. The organization is able to upgrade its capabilities and application performance without additional capital expenditure. In the case of a Managed VMware solution, the business gets enterprise-grade resource allocation tools while also avoiding adding the technical and maintenance responsibilities associated with the cloud infrastructure.

Step Into Virtual Infrastructure

For many companies graduating from a traditional server environment, such as a shared hosting solution, a fully managed private cloud is a logical next step. Virtualizing your infrastructure enables you to run each of your workloads in an environment optimized for it. Storage and computing resources are allocated, the operating system chosen, and all necessary software deployed to run each application.

This makes a managed VMware private cloud ideal for companies that want to optimize their infrastructure spending and performance, but do not want to dedicate in-house time and expertise to become proficient in cloud infrastructure management. A service provider that offers high-quality service and support can help the business determine its needs and set up the private cloud to meets them. A VMware Private Cloud architected by experienced professionals should start yielding benefits in flexibility and reliability immediately, and depending on the specifics of your business, could also start generating application performance and cost efficiency benefits right away.

Dealing with variable workloads, security, regulatory compliance, and maturing development processes are just three of the common use cases for customers of Liquid Web’s Managed VMware Private Cloud. Some organizations will want to upgrade their entire hosting environment, while others will want to take leverage the best of the environment they already have with a hybrid approach. To figure out whether a VMware private cloud is the right fit for your business, contact the Most Helpful Humans in Web Hosting™ and ask to speak to a managed hosting advisor today.

Evaluating Your Current Hosting Infrastructure?

Still getting value out of your existing infrastructure investments? Hesitant to move everything into the cloud right away? Liquid Web’s Managed Private Cloud powered by VMware could benefit your organization, serving those workloads you are confident of running more efficiently, with greater resilience, right away.